


Loyalties

by seekingsquake



Series: If Seeing Is Believing Then Believe That We Have Lost Our Minds [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Needs a Hug, Clint Feels, Clint Needs a Hug, F/M, Gen, Natasha needs a hug too but won't tell anyone, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Everything Else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 18:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1909968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He can't trust us and we can't trust him."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loyalties

**Author's Note:**

> I have no affiliation with Marvel. I just want to hug everyone.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]

Loki is stuck, laying in the crater that Hulk created with his flimsy god body, with Mjolnir tied around his torso. Two men, a woman, a super solider, a demigod, and a hulk are waiting for SHIELD to come collect the instigator of the alien invasion that they just defeated, and they’re tired and weary and, in Stark’s case, a little obsessed with shawarma.

“When Mean Green here turns back into Bruce,” he’s saying as he pours himself a shot of whiskey into a small glass, “I say we go. Dude’s probably hungry. I know I sure am.”

Hulk is standing at one of the unsmashed wall to wall windows, looking out and rumbling quietly. Clint watches him for a moment before making a slow but purposeful approach.

“Barton,” Tash warns, panic in her eyes that Clint can only see because of the years they’ve spent looking out for each other. Rogers steps forward as if to intercept him, but Clint waves them both off and clears his throat to get Hulk’s attention.

Hulk’s head turns and green eyes zero in on Clint as he slowly lifts a hand and reaches out. Everyone watches with bated breath and Hulk huffs, then snuffles Clint’s hand like an uncertain dog. “Hey Man,” Clint says, his voice quiet and calm.

Hulk rumbles, and Stark sputters when the green behemoth half states, half questions, “Follower?”

Clint nods slowly. “That’s right Buddy. I used to follow you. Used to look out for Banner. Is it okay if I look out for him now?”

Hulk stares at Clint for a long, tense moment before he huffs again and closes his eyes. He sits heavily and slowly, slowly, his skin starts changing pigments, his bones and muscles shifting and creaking and shrinking, and it’s five long minutes of painful looking metamorphosis before Hulk is gone and Banner is laying in his place.

Tash is as far away from them as possible. Stark is caught somewhere between slack jawed awe and an immense frown, Rogers’ eyes are the size of saucers. Thor says solemnly, attempting to use a quiet volume but failing, “That looks terribly painful.”

Clint’s movements are still slow, still obvious, and his voice is still quiet and calm. “Hey Doc,” he says as he moves into a crouch by Banner’s shoulder. There is no response from the physicist for a few seconds before his left leg twitches and he groans. He struggles to sit up, his arms shaking in an attempt to carry his weight, but Clint puts and hand on his shoulder and eases him back down. “Just give yourself a minute, Doc. No rush.”

“Clint?” Bruce’s voice is hoarse and his speech is sort of slurred. “When..? How..?”

“Agent Romanoff brought me back while you and Hulk took a walk.”

Bruce is quiet for a long moment, the only sound his ragged breaths. Then he says softly, hoarsely, “I’m going to vomit.”

Clint remembers watching Bruce return to himself after transformations. He remembers screaming and crying and shivering through the night after being drained of motivation to move. He remembers very vividly the vomiting and the sweating and the trembling. It doesn’t look like Bruce is going to scream or cry or fall into a catatonic stillness, so he waves a hand in Stark’s direction, and a small garbage can is pulled out from under the bar sink and tossed at him. He catches it and puts it near Bruce’s head, and Bruce pulls himself up enough to throw up inside it. He is sweating and trembling just like Clint remembers, and it makes Clint angry. After all these years he’s figure it’d get easier; that eventually the transformation wouldn’t pull Bruce’s whole body inside out and make him feel sick for days and hate himself even longer. But here he is, six years after the first time, vomiting and sweating and trembling just the way he did when he told strangers his name was Bobby and Clint followed him around the world.

Clint sits beside Bruce until he’s done, and his eyes find Tash’s from across the room. He wishes he could find sympathy or empathy or something in his partner’s eyes, but all he sees is her usual cold detachment.    

* * *

“If Thor hadn’t been there.”

“Tash. Don’t.”

Clint and Natasha are sitting in a conference room on the helicarrier. Steve and Thor are speaking to each other, Thor’s voice booming even as he tries to be quiet. Loki is back in the newly retrieved and hastily repaired Hulk cage, handcuffed and muzzled and glaring. Tony and Bruce are being ushered to the medical wing, kicking and screaming. Well, Stark is kicking and screaming. Banner is being dragged by two freaked out junior agents because he is too out of it to walk on his own.

Clint knows that the transformations are hard on Banner’s body, and he’s having a hard time reconciling what Tash is telling him with what he knows of Banner, and what Tash is giving away with what he knows of her. “You read the file, right? You watched for a year. You should have known better.” There is no heat in his voice, not really, because he knows that she’s still scared, but he just doesn’t understand.

“He didn’t have any incidents the whole time. And you were never in his face when it happened. What would you have said? I didn’t have the luxury distance.”

“He wouldn’t have killed you.”

And if she was anybody else, Clint knows she might have laughed a sound that was bitter and sarcastic. Instead all she says is, “Yes. He would have,” in her carefully crafted neutral voice.

“Tash-”

“No,” Natasha says, and it’s quiet and precise and just like her. “Remember when you told me he was like I used to be? You’re wrong. Banner is nothing like me. Hulk is everything that I used to be, except bigger and louder and far less subtle. Banner is never going to do anything to hurt us. Hulk will kill us.”

“No,” Clint parrots back, and he doesn’t usually fight her so hard on anything, but he’s starting to get kinda pissed. “If he feels safe and if he feels like he can trust us, everyone’s going to be fine.”

He tries to press a kiss to her temple, partly to reassure her and partly because he’s so fucking shaken up inside and he needs something familiar, but she ducks away from him. She’s more closed off with him than she has been in years as she murmurs, “He can’t have that, Barton. Nothing we’ll ask him to do is safe, and he can’t trust us. We need him to be able to keep control under these conditions, and if he can’t, we need to know that Hulk will know he can’t smash us. But he’ll smash us anyway.”

“He won’t,” Clint insists, and he doesn’t know why he’d expected Tash to connect with Banner, but he had. The fact that she’s treating him the same sort of way she’s treating Loki is really irritating him. Didn’t she read the file? Hadn’t she been watching him? Hulk had been gentle with and protective of Betty Ross, had saved her life twice in the span of a few days. Hulk had saved Tony Stark even though he didn’t know him and had no previous knowledge of him. Hulk had taken orders from Cap with no questions and no resistance. Fuck, Hulk hadn’t even hurt Loki all that bad, just knocked him around enough to keep him down for a while. The demigod was already back on his feet and walking like it was no big deal. Clint knew Hulk’s patterns and thought processes; it’d been pretty clear to him that Hulk wouldn’t purposely hurt someone who wasn’t trying to hurt him. “He tried to kill you because he felt you were a threat. But we’re-,”

“We are threats to him, Barton.”

And Clint snaps his mouth shut and grinds his teeth because there’s nothing he can say. He personally is no threat to Hulk. He doesn’t even want to be. But the WSC, SHIELD, fuck, maybe even the rest of the Avengers Initiative are or could definitely be threats to him. If Fury were to turn to him and order him to knock Banner out and throw him in the Hulk Tank he would do it, not because he’s really a threat, but because SHIELD and Tash are all he has. And in the end, if he can’t commit to being on Banner and Hulk’s side, on keeping them safe, then it does sort of make him a threat. They aren’t his mission anymore. “But we don’t.. We don’t have to be.”

“He’s a liability.”

“If we just-”

“Clint.”

Clint. Clint. Clint. That’s all Tash has to say, because she’s the only one who calls him that, and she only does it when it’s important, and she’s all he has. Loki tried to take SHIELD from him, and maybe it worked because Coulson is dead and Hill won’t look him in the eye and Fury is acting like he isn’t even there. Loki tried to take Tash too, but Tash pulled him back. She always pulls him back, and he can’t throw that away for a guy who used to be his target but isn’t anymore. Tash saved his life, is always saving his life, and she’s all he has. Maybe she’s all he’ll ever have. He closes his eyes and takes a breath, and Tash presses a kiss to his temple because she just knows him so well and knows he needs the physical reassurance, and then she leaves to go check on Stark and Banner in the medical wing.

He wants to leave it at that. He wants to trust Tash and follow her wherever she leads and for it to be the two of them, just like nothing’s changed and he wasn’t brainwashed and there isn’t a scientist who is a hulk just down the hall. But he can’t.

Because Banner calls him Clint, too.


End file.
